ABSTRACT
Special education has come to occupy the high ground of many contemporary educational debates. In many respects, questions of efficient and quality instruction, alternative learning modes, cultural differences impacting student performance, and definitions of ability arise from practical necessity from within special education. The diverse and challenging composition of special education often contrasts with the more homogeneous and routinized classes of general education (Ferguson 1989, pp. 50–51). Such evidence describes an historical irony: From positions of exclusion and exemption, the incorporation of exceptional children leads progressively to an inversion of common schooling, elevating special education to the forefront of pedagogical innovation and judicial reform. Much like the contemporary reforms of deinstitutionalization and diversion that “are the juvenile court and the reformatory turned inside out” (Sutton 1988, p. 207), the maturation of special education has assumed the historic charge of common schooling (Hurt 1988, pp. 189–193). Special education is strategically situated to conceptualize a single system of instruction and to assume much of the innovative leadership to effect its implementation.
